Her Italian musician-friend — and rumoured lover — David Rizzio had already met a similarly dreadful end, suffering 56 stab wounds at the hands of her husband and his cronies. In turn, the Queen’s husband, Lord Darnley, was later murdered, either by strangulation or by a keg of gunpowder detonated directly beneath his sleeping quarters.

Ghastly events such as these hold modern imaginations sufficiently captive to warrant the creation of a major motion picture. Perhaps more surprising is that this blood-soaked history also brought about one of the great works of the orchestral repertoire nearly 200 years ago.

In 1829, a young German composer named Felix Mendelssohn set out on his first trip to England and Scotland. One of the stops along this walking tour was Holyrood Palace and the ruins of the chapel nearby. He wrote to his family:

“In the evening twilight we went today to the palace where Queen Mary lived and loved; a little room is shown there with a winding staircase leading up to the door; up this way they came and found Rizzio in that little room, pulled him out, and three rooms off there is a dark corner, where they murdered him.

“The chapel close to it is now roofless; grass and ivy grow there, and at that broken altar Mary was crowned Queen of Scotland. Everything around is broken and mouldering, and the bright sky shines in. I believe I found today in that old chapel the beginning of my Scottish Symphony.”

Mendelssohn began working on this symphony while still on his Grand Tour of the British Isles, but it took him nearly 13 years to finish it.

The Scottish Symphony opens as if appearing out of the gloomy, swirling mists of the northern isles, and it finishes with a blaze of sunlight in one of the most majestic melodies of the orchestral repertoire.

Though it was published as the third of his five masterful symphonies, it was actually the last Mendelssohn would complete, and it stands as one of his greatest contributions to the symphonic canon.

It’s quite likely that, given an opportunity to comment, my Scottish ancestors would call me a big wimp. But the more I learn about Mary, Queen of Scots and her compatriots, I’m happy for the 500 years’ distance and the chance to ponder it all from my comfortable seat in the movie theatre.